~ the sadness most ~

Sit still enough to let each memory

pass through the heart’s low doorway – again

I am with him, sitting on his lap like the cat

I wanted to be at that age. Soft, my back

against his lean chest in a green

sweater, always smelled of rain and paint thinner,

the first man I danced with. Slowly we are made

from what we touch and hold,

either in passing or at length, doesn’t matter –

a brief love may cut the deepest. But loving him

has been close to always, a path

to which I see no end, perhaps

only because the way is often

in darkness. Darkness he taught me to trust –

where the moon is found, and windows with curtains

yet open reveal life-sized dioramas, other people’s

evenings. He told me stories – one of his mother’s

death – just as the heart monitor flat-lined, a train

whistle sounded in the distance. Trains he rode away on

at my age, leaving her at home, sending postcards

she saved her whole life. When she took him

shopping as a child, he hid in clothes racks, behind

soap displays – “don’t disappear,” she told him. His own

absence could not resist, stay.